Obviously, they should ask their user base for initial offers in shares, first, Like Canonical should ask users in Launchpad for their offers for shares first aswell. Otherwise it disrespectful to all the hard work.

Hashgraph may be the blockchain next gen. application that really gets corporations onboard. Cryptonerds may cry (at least for now) that it lacks the openness of conventional blockchain, but if big money moves in because of performance and especially security advantage, then Hashgraph might take the cake.

Agree, enjoy episodes that mix it up and try new formats, keeps it fresh.

appreciated recent guest co-hosts.
also like episodes that focus on 1-2 topics in more depth.
lowering polish on production is fine (musical stings, I don’t mean bad quality audio ~ assume it saves time on the editing) - content is king!

So firstly when the emergency call is activated on a mobile the number is not sent. Unlike a normal call an emergency call uses a special call setup type. Most phones have a UI setting for the emergency number, which just means when I enter these digits do an emergency call setup, not a normal call. 112 is the Europe standard emergency call number but most phones and networks also recognise 911 and 999.

There is no problem in making a test call to the emergency number. But DO NOT HANG UP speak to the operator and say you are just testing, they will be fine with that. If you hang up they have to call back or send a police car to check.

You can make an emergency call without a SIM in the phone in many networks, in which case you don’t have a number, you can also do so if your prepay balance is zero and cannot make normal calls.

@xplora1a my initial thoughts were the same as those of @neuro but there may be national differences here. It would seem to make sense to be able to test this provided it was very infrequent and you were upfront about the fact that this is just a test.

However, having sent an e-mail to the address given by @neuro it is very much frowned upon in the UK. The argument being that if an operator is talking to you then they are not handling a real emergency. Note I was not asking to test my phone, just what the general position was. There may be national differences I am not aware of however.

Well my experience is different. If BT now want notification then that is fine. Remember we are talking about mobile networks here, not fixed line and the like. You should absolutely not use an emergency call to test that your phone or system is working, use the speaking clock for that. But after setting up a complex system, you should make a single call to the emergency number to verify that it is working.

A routing or configuration error here could be life threatening.

It is a short call, just say “Telecom engineer making a test call. Thank you” and hang up.

Well my experience is different. If BT now want notification then that is fine. Remember we are talking about mobile networks here, not fixed line and the like. You should absolutely not use an emergency call to test that your phone or system is working, use the speaking clock for that. But after setting up a complex system, you should make a single call to the emergency number to verify that it is working.

A routing or configuration error here could be life threatening.

It is a short call, just say “Telecom engineer making a test call. Thank you” and hang up.

I have to say that this sounds like awful advice, if everyone who got a new phone did this then Jesus, the system would fail faster than an inflatable dart board. If every adult in the UK got a new phone every two years and did this that would result in 66780 “test” calls per day on average. Assuming people call during the day, that’s an average increase of ~ 576.0 % calls per minute.

And this doesn’t include kids, of whom most will have a phone now a days.

If you are responsible for setting up, say, a PBX system, you are often required to verify that emergency calls work as expected. This wouldn’t be “New phone, who 911?” this is “I have to verify that the complex call routing I’ve created in this system will not result in possible deaths.”

rather disturbing article about bots creating autogenerated YouTube videos aimed at kids which are actually quite disturbing in a very unfeeling robot way which doesn’t seem to understand what makes things funny rather than creepy.

Coming mostly from the eastern-block, I see, it basically looks like Dempsey’s Den (think early 90’s Art Attack) without the occupational-therapist in the room, (not good from what I can tell).

I am sure, that this will be the stuff of many an assignment in the psychology Dept. at my local Uni - and I look on with interest with talking to students at the pub about what stimuli is being confligrated to bring about such click-bait for kiddies.

Crumbs, and I thought our childrens’ programming had gone a bit topsy-turvey.
I shall stay away in future.

I never did like grott-bags; but I guess that was the message back then - not so psy-warfare for the eyes, and more easy to get-along with, err, less questions.

but then again, there was always the Amstrad GX4000 to plug-in
( Yes, that’s how bad my dads knowledge of buying hardware, back then, and still possibly remains ! )

changing the tone @sil - Did you ever come across any amstrad’s in your christmas-past ?

lost dozens of assignments because I use to click close (without saving) on the old pcw 9512

My impression is that the creepy YouTube videos have the touch of AI/neural networks/machine learning/etc. – the pattern mostly fits but you can still tell that the (machine) creators aren’t playing by the same rules as the rest of us. And the sheer volume suggests that humans aren’t in the pipeline.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly RAE) is the measure by which research output of UK universities is measured. It happens every 4 or so years. To have your journal paper be eligible for use in REF, it must be open access by a certain date (3 months iirc) after the publish date. This does not mean that it must be open access at the publishing journal, just that it must be in an open access repository somewhere else. Typically open access at the publisher == lots of money. The other accepted approach is to take the “preprint” draft and deposit that in the institution repository - http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/ for the University of Nottingham (my employer) for example.

What this means is that anybody who cares about their research in the UK at least will be making their papers (especially the good ones) open access, because otherwise the paper won’t be eligible for REF which is important for academic careers.

TLDR: The problem of paywalled papers should be going away in the UK at least, as long as you can search beyond the publisher.

To have your journal paper be eligible for use in REF, it must be open access by a certain date (3 months iirc) after the publish date.

This is only until April 2018 then the 3 month period is removed.

The other accepted approach is to take the “preprint” draft and deposit that in the institution repository - http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/ for the University of Nottingham (my employer) for example.

Pre-prints are useful but I always warn students against using them, with the movement to make “postprints” more weighty it’ll be interesting to see how the two are distinguished . Although thankfully in Physics 90% of work is already published open access as required by research council grants. Hopefully the REF can push other, more privately funded subjects to follow suite.

Typically open access at the publisher == lots of money.

This is also another good point, although typically Universities pay for this and it doesn’t come out of your grant. I cant remember how much my last paper cost to publish but it was in the thousands.